Ask HN: How has Hacker News changed over the years?

HN has always been a mixed bag: It takes some work to sift through the links and comment section to find gold.

Some times I come across old threads in Google searches and I’m shocked by the quality of the older discourse. It’s much harder to find threads with deep, nuanced conversations today than it was even a few years ago.

The sharpest change happened around the start of the pandemic when everyone started working from home. I think HN became a social outlet for more people all at once. Combine that with pandemic-related frustrations and the vibe here became sharply angrier. Even dang has mentioned the pandemic-related influx of angry users in a few comments.

Lately I’m also surprised at how anti-tech and pro-regulation the comment sections have become. Recent Facebook threads are the best example of a lot of angry, low-effort comments (do we really need 100 comments from different people bragging about quitting Facebook every time the topic comes up?).

Standard disclaimer that this is from my fallible memory. I’ve been here just about daily since 2009 or so (at first, under a real-name account that I retired, because times a’changed).

Of course, there were far, far fewer users. They had much less forgettable names. There wasn’t the preponderance of throwaways that you see now. My impression was that a large portion of the users were actually affiliated with YC companies, and a lot of the discussion was about YC business and tech. Paul Graham was an active commenter. You got to know who the regulars were, and recognize them by name. I find that much harder to do now.

As far as content, I honestly can’t remember whether there was really more tech, or more business, or less politics. What I do is that the issues, and the way people frame and debate them, has changed a lot in 12 years. But that’s not specific to HN. HN seems to lag behind “the discourse” on more mainstream social media sites, and I think that’s good.

Sometime around 2011 (?) there was a crisis in which there was a great deal of debate over a period of months, about whether the quality of comments and discussion was declining. I was of the opinion that comment quality had been extremely high at first, and was in fact slipping. The other side said we were imagining things, and Eternal Septembering or whatever. pg eventually sort of agreed there was a problem, and asked for solutions. There was much debate. He made some tweaks to the site.

But the perception of decline remained. pg seemed to gradually back away from what he had created. At some point we got the high-profile active moderation you see today. pg has been almost entirely absent for years now.

Not sure if it was in my head or not as I look back, but seemed like more technical articles (not that there aren't plenty still). I remember the thing that drew me into HN was when a coworker showed me, and there was in depth conversations about compiler design that I had never experienced before. I was such a cool way to discover new ideas that I hadn't even heard of. It still is for sure, but I'm going to chalk my personal case up to rose colored glasses.

Maybe it is just selective memory, but I feel like the "Show HN" became a lot less fun.

We're there always this many dead accounts? It seems like I see dead accounts on almost every thread these days. Most of which are for good reason...

I feel like nowadays whenever certain companies are mentioned there's tons of comments just ranting how they hate company X, not even mentioning anything to do with the article.

It’s totally useless and they don’t contribute to discussion at all.

I have been a user for years now, mostly just skimming through when I get the time. It's been extremely positive whenever I became engaged. I don't knock peoples attempts to money grab. You have to eat and there's money here. However, it makes me cringe nonetheless. What I'd really like to see more of (and maybe it's here and I miss it) is when people do share their startup or something, give the nitty gritty and try in all ways possible to make it beneficial to this community, through learning, some sort of engagement or pure giving stuff away. Give a little and HN will always deliver.

I am not classifying any of these as good or bad. Consider it as a list of observations.

* There were more stories about the technical platforms of startups. Most of the time, the technical founders joined us here for those discussions. We had heated discussions on the philosophies of DHH vs PG. Now we don't hear about those bootstrapping stories or seed investments anymore.

* The quality was greater, in my subjective opinion. I lost count of the number of useful or interesting experimental thoughts or ideas I read only here. On no other social platform could I find such diverse and thought-provoking thoughts and ideas. On more than one occasion, when I asked a question about a company or a framework, the founder or creator replied. They all seemed to converge here. It was amazing.

* This place had a lot of active Googlers of every age range. Now, people identify themselves as FAANG employees more often than not.

* Show HN (or its equivalent) used to be very active. Now, when I go there, the page looks like a ghost town.

I see a lot more greyed out comments recently.